f13.net

Are we stuck with this trinity and its hybrids? Are they inherent in the combat mechanic? If not, what other metrics might  measure "classes" (whether game defined or skill selected) besides their suvivability and damage capacity? Why are Nukers so popular that groups must constantly "looking for healer/tank"? Can that popularity be diffused without being defused?

As long as the base mechanic for players to interact with npc's that grant xp is damage I think games are going to be a variation of classes that do damage (+/-) and damage suppression (active/passive), i.e. nuker/healer and enchanter/tank.

Specialization:  One way to divert player attention from the holy trinity (quaternary, whatever) is to not use specialists.  One way to do this would be to simply not have classes that could do combat healing, and balance combat based on that.

Different Player/NPC interaction:  Another way to get away from the holy trinity is to add additional modes of interaction with NPCs.
Example 1: a thief class must sneak into a camp and steal an item to gain exp.  PC interacts with NPC by avoiding them.
Example 2: a holy man must convert a town to the worship of his god while surviving/neutralizing agents of the opposite faction. PC interacts with NPC via influence.

I'm sure there are other examples, but I think the first question that gets raised with 2 is, do players want a more sophisticated (and therefore more complicated) game?  Do they want to do more then just bash something over the head?  What percentage of your players want this?

Will we be delivered from it? No. In WoW things were looking headed away from it, because all of the characters have fairly similar HP pools.  You can allow 'squishies' to take a few hits and absorb some damage - until you hit the 55+ game.  Then it becomes heal/tank/nuke. However, even before that point you still find players will only do instances with 'the optimal!' group.  I don't think anyone - devs or players - are able to think outside the box at this point.

 If you try, people will bitch that their percieved class doesn't heal/nuke/tank well enough and hey, why don't I have a bazillion more hp/ac mp/damage than that guy, whose role is 'other than mine.'

As to the scarcity of Healers: In a number of games it's just damn boring. Not many games give you things to do besides watch HP bars and make sure they don't hit 0. Also, healing classes usualy do such pitiful damage (Because of the trinity mindset) that they level so slow the majority who try them get frustrated and quit long before capping-out.  It's also percieved as an effiminate role,  because (of course) it's in-game nurturing, and "only women want to help people."  Men should be out there nuking/ bazooking/ hacking and slashing shit up, getting things done!  So you'll have very few people attracted to the role.

Asheron's Call 1 didn't have a dedicated healer class, since it was skill based on class based.

All melee could heal themselves with healing kits (including in combat) if they bought that skill.

A melee class could even buy the Life Magic skill and heal themselves and others.   In fact almost every standard template included Life magic, but more for the debuffs than for the healing.  Potions were also fairly common, and endlessly usable in combat.

I don't think anyone played as a pure healer, you technically could if you wanted to.   Also you could kill mobs using only Life magic, since it had drains and damage spells also.

This was all countered in AC1 by NOT having insane hitpoints at high levels like every other game.  In AC1 you started with between 5-50 hp (your choice based on attribute allocation), and grew when all buffed around 400ish.

It was also balanced by having to break combat, do a healing animation, then restart combat, during which you were more vulnerable.  So one had to decide when to do it.  Also heal was likely to fail if healing from low health.

It's based on the way the world works. Why would it go away? What would replace it?

And that's not the trinity from EQ, anyway. So there's one delivery for you, in a way.

How about moving away from games based on killing altogether?

Find a replacement for hit points.

AC1 also had little to no grouping beyond "a few people soloing together" at least when I played it (for a few months after release).  The thing about tank-heal-dps is that it is a solid foundation upon which to build a game based on cooperation and interdependence.  Now, you don't have to have a cooperative or interdependent game, but then you have to justify yoru monthly fee and find some other way to ensure retention. 

You don't need to replace hit points, just make them fixed at character creation. The tank/healer paradigm is a result of the level-based progression system. A UO/AC1 skill based system could solve alot of the exponential power curve problems. I loved how in UO that even a maxed character could die from enough low level mobs.

If you are going with a strict class based system of static skill sets, a level based progression/power curve and, most importantly, primary focus on combat then yes, you're pretty well stuck with the trinity.  You're optons are to go with a different system, like GW and their swappable skills, or a fully skill based system

OR

Stop making combat not only be 95% plus of your gameplay but also having only two combat outcomes, victory or death.

Xilren
Edit: english is hard

If we were rescued, would we really be happy? There will either always be roles that are required or it will just be a horde of DPS classes (or templates) zerging (or soloing). 

I think WOW's done a good job at offering variability for healing classes. I can fill multiple roles with my two healers. And I have no trouble soloing.

Also, from what i remember, the original Holy Trinity was Warrior, Cleric, and Chanter. It was mez, not DPS.

The problem stems from the assumption that combat has to be mostly hits, i.e. that all characters need to start with a base 50% chance to hit the target and go up from there. There is no defense involved, no active thought put towards having to defend yourself from attacks. Everything either hits or misses, or is automatically parried.

Combat needs to be about manuevering for the right shot and taking it when it's offered. It needs to be about careful (or frenetic) avoidance of damage as opposed to absorbtion of damage. You'll never get away from the tank paradigm if damage absorption is more efficient than damage avoidance.

From a realistic perspective, damage avoidance in melee combat SHOULD be preferable and more efficient. In real melee combat, getting whacked with a sword, even if it didn't penetrate your armor, should stun you for a second. It should knock you off your corn flakes, reeling for a second. But in MMOG's, it's actually better to take a hit and absorb the damage than it is to miss. I thought City of Heroes might make this up with the scrapper Super Reflexes set, but it doesn't. In real melee combat, not getting hit means you don't have any shock to the system.

Twitch would help that a lot, but it isn't a panacea. You could still make defense important in a non-twitchy system, just by making dodging/parrying/damage avoidance an active necessity, as well as making hits stun the player or open them up to more hits.

It's no surprise I'd rather duck behind a parapet and let a grenade sail over my head than rely on my catassed level to roll the dice for me while I sit drooling, awaiting the outcome passively.

Also, :nda:

DDO is going to ROCK!

I'm in several beta tests ;)

I'll take that as an admission that DDO won't have grenades and will therefore suck!

If your only concern is the actual make-up of the group then I'd suggest the following for WoW (since that is what I'm currently playing and most familiar with.)

Presenting Theme Based Instancing:

- Evil Corrupted Caverns! - All holy effects cause pain to the user and/or cut by 3/4 effectiveness.  Magical Healing?  Uh uh.  Bandages?  Yep.
- Nexus of Anti-Magus - All arcane magics cause pain to the user and/or cut by 3/4 effectiveness.  Mages need not enter.
- Antielemental Core - All elemental magics cause pain to the user and/or cut by 3/4 effectiveness.  Nerf of a lifetime.
- Hive of physical damage resistant creatures (ok, I'm running out of names or just don't care anymore) - Physical attacks are reduced by 3/4 and reflected damage 1/4 of each strike.

Each of these instances would have nice rewards that people WILL want so now you are forcing people to think differently about group mix.  The optimum group has now changed depending on what instance you want to hit for that week, etc. 

To make it more interesting, make many of the rewards for each instance the best rewards for the classes that are restricted in that instance.  Forced cooperation anyone?

Just an idea.

I liked your idea until you got to this line.  I saw it coming, was was cringing in preperation.  I got most of the way thru, and you hadn't said it yet, so I almost started to breathe easy... and then you said it.

What kind of magical item would be stored in an anti-arcane-magic nexus?  Would the anti-magic nature of the place drain it of power?  besides that, there's the matter of wanting items in a place where you are completely, or nearly completely, useless.  Like being an enchanter on a big mob raid in EQ...  Where you'd hit your 'make my buff hit everyone in range' AA ability, then hit the big mana regen power, another chanter would do the same with the group haste power, and then you'd go /autofollow on someone because a monk, necro, SK, or bard was single-pulling everything.  You sucked at damage, often stuff in the zone(Kael, Skyshrine, snake place on the moon) was immune to your CC effects, you'd already buffed everyone, and your debuffs were worthless if a shaman was in the raid.

Getting a group together so they can kill stuff while you twiddle your thumbs and collect lewts is a non-functional idea.  Getting a pickup group for such a place will be nigh impossible without a reward of some kind for the people actually fighting.  Say, you can only get in if you have a mage in the group, but kills inside are worth more exp than normal for the level, for everyone but the mage.  So you'd want to do your own instances, for the items, and other instances, for the nice exp.  Or set it up so everyone gets a quest at the begining, which is completed by getting the mage to the crystal of item-handing-out or whatever at the end, with a big exp/cash/faction reward.  You need to set it up so people would rather do these, if possible, than just hunt somewhere the mage would be useful for exp.

Alkiera

Star Wars: Obi-wan on the Xbox has a pretty good sword attack/block system. Granted it's with lightsabers but at least your sword hits the enemy sword and it's not both of you flailing around in mid air while the dice roll. I don't remember but Jedi Academy II probably had a similar mechanic. The thumb stick might be more conducive to moving the lightsaber around though as it feels pretty natural.

Is it so much to ask for swords that actually hit each other? Even if you only fake it via graphics on the client side.

I hate forced grouping. If a game has to force grouping by restricting gameplay, it's failed. EQ2 is the ultimate bag of shit in that regard.

Games like Planetside reward grouping while not penalizing solo play. It's just that four guys working together are going to steamroller a guy playing alone, but four guys playing alone can sometimes beat four guys playing together. Or a solo player can support a group of players with peripheral tactics, setting up towers and AMS, etc. This also has a nice side effect, you can swap roles on the fly to adapt to the situation, instead of being stuck in a single role so you need other people to play.

You need other people to play because it's more fun, not because the game code says so.

And combat...if you hit someone, you hit them. They may have mitigation via armor, but you hit if you hit. If you miss, say they duck behind the parapet I mentioned earlier, you miss. "Twitch" gameplay is really the only style that makes sense for combat, imo. Otherwise it gets boring fast and rewards the folks who play the longest, which is a pretty naked way of saying you have to buy your power, directly or indirectly, and that's lame, not to mention it doesn't translate across titles in the genre, unlike FPS skills.

Ah, to get away from Three Boring Classes... (http://www.brokentoys.org/?p=6600)

Boring classes are a symptom of a boring game. You could make the most amazing class ever...EVER - and if the game wouldn't let you do all the things your brain says the class should do it wouldn't live up to expectations. Oh, and it would be boring. Like walking around in Guild Wars against invisible walls.

Boring groups are a symptom of everyone thinking everyone else is of the LCD. Odds are that the drooling retard on the other computer saying "ur" and "lolfagz" and eating urine cakes thinks you are some sort of mongoloid fucker who spells everything out and shouldn't be playing with his "High Technology."

As far as the whole "combat sucks" thing happening here...  :dead_horse:
 

Aren't they cute?

(http://mgrsti3030s.seamlesstech.biz/Merchant/0701/0503/dqm_big_store.jpg)

For a level based, killing mobs kind of game, City of Heroes/City of Villains - at least in the 32 and below game - does not mandate this set.  Certainly City of Villains does not - there is no "tank" class nor a "healer" class.

There's damage, crowd control, debuffing, buffing (which includes healing) and pet powers (I might be missing one or two).  The powersets are combinations of these: masterminds are pet/buff, dominators are medium damage/control, brutes are heavy damage/self buff, corrupters are medium damage/buff, stalkers are stealth/damage. 

Brutes can tank, if there's a buffer or two in the group who can heal, but it's not required.  There are many different ways to play, depending upon what the group makeup is.  I have rarely been in a group where we needed a particular powerset to be successful; some group makeups are more successful than others.

But the game hasn't been out that long, maybe it's just that the min/maxers haven't dictated what The Way To Play Is.

My experience with City of Heroes was similar, although I never participated in the practice known as "bridging" (I'm not exactly sure what it was, but I assume it was something similar to that mind-numbingly-boring xp spawn of lawn gnomes in Modernagrav in DAOC - a way to level quickly with little risk), and my highest there is level 32.  I don't know what the whole Hamidon thing brings to the game, and how that affects things (the big endgame monster that drops elite goodies).

And yes, they are cute but what are they?

Some thoughts in no particular order...

collision detection

twitch combat

no healing during combat if 'nukers' magic is being used  (or large chance to fizzle)  'healers' compensated with more in a crowd control role and/or being armored and effective in combat

frail, unarmored nukers go down in one hit (or thereabouts)

friendly fire very real and dangerous (archers and nukers; esp. AOE stuff)

Find a way to replace combat as the only real mode of experience gain.

Healer, Nuker and Tank are all artifacts of health value manipulation.

One lowers other peoples health values quickly (nuker), one is difficult to lower the value on (tank) and the third raises the value (healer).  If you can think of other things to do with the number then you can have a new meaningful class.

Or, get rid of the health bar.

What you need is three health bars, one for body, one for mind and one for actions.  That'd be cool.  Then you could make some damage permanent and only able to healed by a fourth class. That'd be cool too.

Thread has been won! GG, next map.

They key problem is aggro control. The only reason the holy trinity exists is that tanks can reliably keep aggro. Remove that ability and your trinity is shot to hell.

Take any game with that trinity, makes mobs attack characters on a purely random bases, and the holy trinity will immediately go away.

Edit: The underlying problem is that combat is entirely predictable and is easily min/maxed. You could create a game where combat was predictable and not have a holy trinity, but you would still have an obvious "best" configuration. If you know exactly what will happen and every combat is basically exactly the same people will quickly hit upon whatever works best. The real solution is make combat less predictable.

I wouldn't call the trinity a factor of hp management as much as I would class-based systems.  Right?  I think the earlier post was dead-on - take a page from Raph and go with skills/point pools.  If I want to template myself as a healer that's my business, not some idiot socially-stunted dev who thinks I can't make my own friends.

I'm also very sympathetic to the argument that when everyone can do everything no one needs each other anymore.  But I then have a Signe moment and condemn them all to eating raw pumpkin with a propane torch as utensil - slim down the point pool if it's that bad. (Signe did I say it right? ;) )

I really do not think we'll see the global network infrastructure that can truly implement defense twitch in the near future.  Not unless someone has finally perfected that negative ping code.  I really wish you console freaks would stop demanding the speed of electricity from Asia to Europe to the US (sorry AUS - you guys chose to identify with Asia so suck it up) defy physics as we understand it today... :P

Console people - adrenalin addiction is real.  Mainline in the privacy of your home if you have to but please, hide the needles from the children.

Not really. A skill-based system might give you more flexibility in defining your role but the archetypes are still there, they just might not be explicitly labeled and in the case of "unbalanced" skill-based systems you might be able to be more than one archetype (aka the "tank mage").

As others have said, the problem revolves around this statement for defeating Lum's "Mobile Bags of Improvement" (MBI):

player's damage per unit time as a percentage of MBI's hit points > MBI's damage per unit time as a percentage of player's hit points

The different archetypes spring up from manipulating the various numbers on either side of that statement. You can tweak things so that certain archetypes disappear (e.g. give everybody the same hps and damage mitigation to remove tanks) but everything will still revolve around damage and hit points. The other alternative, like others have said, is to give players other means of advancement outside of popping MBIs (assuming we're talking about RPGs).

Edit: fixed typo

Actually no. PlanetSide, which is pure PvP combat still has the role of the tank in infantry combat (i.e. the Maxes).

No, in Planetside, tanks really ARE tanks :P

Maxes aren't any different than a regular infantry in my view. It's just a different configuration of variables like more armor + more ammo + special mode - turning time - flexibility (base caps/vehicles/selfrepair) - etc.. All the "infantry" classes in Planetside are just slider bar variables on how much ammo you want to carry, how much damage you can do, how much armor you want, and how fast you want to be able to move. The more you take in one the less you get in everything else. And pretty much three shots from the right gun against your loadout will kill you.

So you have the following and say 510 points to spend on those four "attributes":
-Damage 0-255
-Speed 0-255
-Ammo 0-255
-Armor 0-255

Something that might be interesting would be the Planetside expanding flexibility level system coupled with the Guild Wars expanding flexibility skill system. You fill up your Planetside inventory with Guild Wars skills. Maybe the more powerful the "skill" the more blocks it takes up in the inventory. It might make an interesting way to impliment fantasy RPG style elements (spells) in a Planetside style game without being your generic Hexen "shoot the magic staff instead of the gun" FPS.

Planetside isn't a good example. In real life we have tanks for a reason. The problem is not tanks. That whole combined arms thing exists for a reason. The army has tanks, which are good up close and have good defense. Then it has missiles, which are basically nukers. Then there are mechanics, aka healers. But then there are infantry for taking over cities, medics, etc.

In any game that represents warfare of some sort you are going to see tanks. And you are going to see specialization. That's the nature of war really. My point is that the more you can control the situation, the more specialization you see.

Air force guys learn how to use guns because there is a chance they will have to do some ground fighting. If they could control the situation 100% and never have to fight without planes they would just skip that entirely. Mechanics need to know how to handle guns for the same reason. And it's nice if someone in a tank crew knows some mechanics, even if they aren't a mechanic. Because you never know when you need to fix something or get into some situation you didn't quite expect.

If you can exactly control and predict the situation having well-rounded guys doesn't make sense. Specialists have higher strengths, but also higher weaknesses. If you can avoid the weakness by controlling the situation obviously the high strength is what matters. If you can't control the situation well the weaknesses come into play and it encourages jack of all trades.

But even that isn't the whole story. Control = specialization is one part. But then you have, even if everyone is very specialized, how many specializations are there? There doesn't have to be three. For example in a game where you encounter group mobs a lot there may be 4: nuker, healer, tank, crowd controller. In a game where you have to take over enemy bases there may be a thief/spy class.

So there are really 2 things in play. To summarize, because it's a bit unclear:

The more you can control and predict the situation, the more speciailzed roles can be because you can effectively eliminate their weaknesses.

The number of different specializations depends on the game mechanics.

My personal opinion is that over-specialization is bad because it leads to the perfect group syndrome, where one configuration is just way better than others and certain classes are shunned.

That's why I said infantry combat.

Maxes have high damage (though they only do high damage against one type of target), high movement speed (run mode), large inventories for ammo, special armor abilities (jump jets, shields) and over triple the armor of the next highest armor infantry cert. Hence the uberness of "Max Crash Teams". They are actually more like tank mages than pure tanks given how powerful they are. Their disadvantages include relatively long reequip time on their armor (so you can't zerg Maxes), slow turning speed (vulnerable to circle strafing), and the inability to do anything other than fire their weapon (i.e. can't repair or use a medical applicator on themselves or others, can't hack, etc.) so they need help if they want to survive for extended periods of time. But they are a true tank class because of their high armor. When you need some sort of infanty to soak up a lot of damage you send in your Maxes.

Get rid of the destination and focus on the journey

Most MMORPGs are implicitly focused on the destination. What level did I reach today? Or at least, how many bubbles did a get towards the next level? As long as that is the case, there is pressure to min/max, and thus look for an “optimal” group. And designers respond by tuning experience gain to an optimal group. The holy trinity rules.

What I want to see is a MMORPG that focuses on how you get to the next level, not how fast.  A MMORPG with really different classes and races, with quite different ways of getting to the experience cap. Soft cap experience and loot gain to something not far above the expected average leveling speed. Sure, someone can focus on being the highest level around, but they won’t be months ahead of the curve.

Without a cap, the only way to prevent one class being “uber” is to nerf their skills or equipment. One slight slip, just one “exploit”, and everything is thrown out of whack. So I never get to play the rogue who lives by stealth and pickpocketing. Too exploitable. The only way to slow people on their way to the next level is to make encounters just doable with optimal group. Hence the holy trinity. In a capped game, most combinations would work in some way on an encounter, with each providing a different play experience. I play these games for Adventure, or try to. And that means it’s the journey, not the destination that counts.

That's up to the players, not the game. EQ is a great example of a game that is completely about the journey. There are some simply incredible dungeons and encounters all through the levels. But people refuse to take it. Instead they sit in the high xp zones and pull.

But the designer is responsible for the environment. And environment changes probable behaviour. If you implicitly design the game as "reaching the next level as fast as possible", then people will min/max. Complaining about optimal groups in an uncapped game is ignoring the effects of the environment that has been created. Its like covering a playing field in ice, then complaining that most people are playing ice hockey not soccer. If you provide a high speed skating surface, most people will put on skates and try and speed. If you provide a MMORPG where speed is rewarded, most people will speed through your content.

The way I see it though is every infantry loadout is a tank mage in Planetside. If a medium infantry can kill a max with 2-3 decimator shots it wasn't much of a tank. UO didn't have the tank/nuker/healer trinity either for the same reason.


I don't think Planetside infantry loadouts can be pigeon holed into RPG tank/nuker/healer roles based on armor alone. The reason being is that regardless of armor all the weapons are created equal and therefore it doesn't hold true in the skill based FPS environment. For example, in Guild Wars if I am a healer and I'm firing my wand at a warrior I'm doing maybe 0-1 damage. So the warrior is a true tank because I can't even kill him with my healer. Whereas in Planetside if I had a support loadout I could also kill a max at the same time with a decimator. But if that same support loadout ran into a medium infantry guy with a lasher the most likely outcome is the support guy dieing.


If there was the same fast run/jump/fly mod for heavy infantry as there is for the max you could max crash with heavy infantry guys. Or even medium infantry guys. Max crashs are more about speed than armor in my view.

Maybe drop "experience" with the dropping of "hitpoints"? Honored jury, we present Exhibit A: EVE Online.

Hitpoints and experience are there because somehow the players have become trained to watch the numbers. So the game is reduced to the numbers.

When a player kills a mob it should be for a "story reason", not just because it's a 3D model wrapped around a packet of experience points. But game designers focus on the system (hitpoints, levels, experience) because that's what they can make and that's what they see sells. So it's further between the original idea in the MMO world than elsewhere - we're unlikely to experience the MMO equivalent of Katamari Damacy or Frequency/Amplitude.

So hitpoints, levels, experience points and the Trinity will continue for as long as we players keep putting the money in their hands when they use them.

Much of the same could be said for UO.  Almost every combat character had mutliple ways of healing.  Caramon Fey was the only PvPer I knew who had ZERO magery.  But then again, he had healing wands to use for when his bandages and potions weren't enough.  So I guess that qualifies as "multiple ways" too.

Playing a dedicated healing in AC1 was pointless because

1. The fellowship system didn't show the party stats and you had to be looking at a specific person to see their health level.
2. Everyone had at least one way to heal, and once you got past the early days, most characters had 3 ways to heal.

When I played Diablo, I didn't care about level; I just cared about making it all the way through the entire dungeon.  It was, you know, FUN.  MMORPGs need to be more like this and less like they are now.

"There’s nothing inherently flawed with the 'three boring classes', it’s a tried and true formula that’s been in existence since Tolkein first put pen to paper and has served well ever since."

WTF is this guy from Lum's web page talking about?  Gandalf hardly ever (never?) cast a combat spell, and he was pretty badass with a sword.

Fuck Tolkien.

HAM?

He threw some mini-fireballs in The Hobbit.  That's the only instance I can think of.

There's also a distinct lack of instant magical healing in Tolkien.  Or almost any literary fantasy setting, really.  Maybe because fights are less dramatic if you know the hero can always bounce back from the brink of death with a swig of a potion.

Either way, I still say "Fuck Tolkien". Somehow, he's still responsible....How ever indirectly.

He directly influenced most fantasy fiction, and in turn, fantasy fiction directly influenced fantasy games. Many (not all, to be fair) fantasy oriented, Tolkien influenced writers don't give a care about three dimensional characters and settings (that goes for Tolkien himself). They just care about settings and archetypes (both of which can be charming to an extent, I guess). That kind of thinking rubs off into video game translations of the genre, I think.

To see a good fantasy game with real class and gameplay depth would require a paradigm shift in how fantasy is thought of in general.

I really don't thing heal/tank/dps is actually the problem. The problem is that heal/tank/dps is implemented in an uninteresting way; of all forms of entertainment I can't imagine a battle less interesting to watch than a MMOG battle.

I tend to think that the biggest mistakes rpg cpmbat makes is that it designers insist on paying homage to the wearing-down-a-big-tank-of-HP D&D system and haven't compared their processes to how either combat sports or movie battles play out. They could also learn a lot from board and card games.

Some characteristics of fun battles either on screen or in sports or in board/card games that are missing from rpgs...

- Battles should be about wearing away defences and then hitting the killer strike, not about wearing away a tank of HPs, where each HP is exactly the same as the last one.
Think about every movie battle ever, think gaining board advantage in a ccg, think about a boxing match. Early exchanges are usually about developing your resources and attacking the resources of the protagonists, not about hitting your opponent directly. Resources might be your stance, positional advantage, endurance, rage, defences, whatever.

- Position should matter. Formation should matter. Pushing forward/back should matter.
Jedi on the high ground pwn. If I'm pushing you down the stairs I expect to hit you more easily. Collision detection should let me protect the caster behind me. Most of what we can actually see in a mmog combat situation (or a movie, or a sport) is the position of the protagonists, we know who is winning a movie fight because he usually pushes the other guy back, and is better able to select his ground. Gaming is mostly visual, yet in a MMOG, position means nothing.

- As the battle develops, action should get more spectacular, not fade away.
RPG systems tend to favour early co-ordinated alpha strikes (when everyone has lots of mana/endurance/hps) and then slowly fade out into individual players repeating attack chains. Combo-chains and rage-meters are turning up in some games; but compare the way mana builds up in a game of M:tG, or the way chess pieces become more powerful as the board clears, or the way a movie battle ends with the big build-up to the spectacular all-or-nothing maneuveur to finish the boss off. Ever been on a mmog-raid where the tanks have to hold down the bad guy while the casters have to build up some complex but delicate ritual to blow the uber-monster apart? Despite the fact that this sort of thing is a movie staple for cooperative victory, I haven't ever seen anything like it in a MMOG, it's usually 'all whittle the life bar down for an hour while healers perform a rotation system for keeping main-tank alive'. Dull.

The way I would do things if I were to design a simple shift from the current structure of the rpg battles that would include some of the above, while remaining in the realm of the achieveable.....

You start with 3 bars...

HP - enough to survive about 3 typical direct hits, can be healed by the cleric archetype, but it's slow and hard. Zero HP = fall down.
Defence - starts out full, some of your moves can replenish it partially, but they require you to give up other resources like attack points, position, time etc. Some abilities might use defence points as part of their activation cost. Whenever an opponent hits you, you roll a save against your current defence bar, a successful save stops you taking HP damage but reduces your defence.
Attack - starts out empty, fills during battle, this resource is used like endurance or mana in a current rpg. Empties fast when not in combat.

Activated abilities mostly cost attack points, more aggressive attacks that open your stance to a counter may also cost def points.

Isn't 'defence' just like more 'HP'? A little bit, but unlike a typical MMOG, we are using defence as a measure of your stance and position, and making clear that instead of instant magic healing being provided solely by a cleric we're making the individual responsible for replenishing it by giving up opportunities to attack (either in terms of losing time or losing attack points). Having this second bar also allows us to add secondary effects when a hit gets through def to the HP bar (eg. wounding a target to prevent them using a certain ability) and allows us to have early-battle attacks that do more def-damage, and late-battle attacks that do more HP-damage or that have secondary effects at a cost of being easier to block if your target has high def. At the very least this introduces more decision making and risk assessments during a battle, it should help move us away from spreadsheets that calculate the best possible attack chain, and it gives devs a way to encourage simple attacks at the start growing into more and more impressive moves as the battle develops.

Isn't this like 'HAM'? No. HAM didn't allow damage from different spec'd players to stack, and HAM was set up such that every move with a single weapon damaged the same stat, and any of the stats could incap you. The fact that HAM left every player working solely with one bar prevented it having any advantage over HP/end/mana, you were still just looking for the best attack on whatever your chosen stat is and repeating it ad nauseam. The purpose of this system is to ensure decision making skills are used to determine which move is best at which point in the battle (how far do we seek positional advantage by using skills that attack def before we switch to the big hitting aggressive HP attacks that may drain our own def?).

I like the defense instead of HP idea.  Make combat significant yet only allow "healing" (strategic positioning or reflex enhancement) in a very limited way.  It may well work out better if your avatar was not repeatedly returned to full health over and over during combat. 

While real life is not always fun in a game, this makes sense.  I've often tried to picture my avatar going from near death to full health over and over during a fight.  What would that look like?  Wouldn't that be very strange?!

I CAN visualize my armor getting worn down slowly, my exhaustion getting the better of me, my reflexes wearing down, my mental abilities lacking, etc.  While those things would be easily remedied in between combat, during combat those things would be very difficult to improve/heal.

There is a lot more to be investigated, but it does show that there are other opportunities for gauging your avatar's procession towards that final killing blow.

Your hatred is misplaced. Blame Gary Gygax for wanting to roll dice to have a reasonably realistic interpretation of combat if you have to blame someone. Shit, blaming Tolkein for hitpoints and classes is like blaming the Madonna for Jesus's crucifixtion.

Hell in Tolkien's stories I don't remember hitpoints or magical healing doing much for people.

In fact, most people just died when stuck through with a sword or arrow.  The one wound that I remember almost killed the hobbit and through several days of rest was able to continue, but it NEVER really healed.  I didn't feel like people were invincible in that story at all.

Hell if you want hardcore, craft the game after Martin.  Nobody lasts past their 40th birthday and the res sickness just makes you one vindictive bitch!

It's even a bit hard to blame Gygax.  He went out of his was several times to talk about HP being an abstract representation of a hero's defense/luck/favor from the Gods/mitigation/whatever rather than an actual chunk of health.  I always thought of healing a damaged player as asking the Gods to boost a guy who had become exhausted/overwhelmed/had used up his political capital with his deity and was about to get punked.  Then again, I am all about self-delusion, so I can understand if others can't suspend this much disbelief of game mechanics.  And, of course, in-combat healing was not as common in D&D. 

I don't blame Gygax a bit. He was just expanding rpg rules for miniature combat and an entire new genre of game was born. That guy deserves a lot of credit, whatever the legacy may have turned into.

My view of things is that D&D was based off the lowest common denominator of a number of fantasy works (I consider Fritz Leiber to be a heavier influence on D&D than Tolkien - we wouldn't have barbarians and rogues if not for Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser).  And MMOGs in turn are based off the lowest common denominator of D&D games.

To its credit, D&D ended up growing in some interesting directions from its Chainmail beginnings, even if MMOGs derive most heavily from the basic "whack foozles in a dungeon" style of D&D game.  The difference is that MMOGs haven't gone through a similar period of growth yet, mainly because there's not as much room for creativity in an industry of that nature.

I don't either, but it's just as retarded as blaming Tolkien for inspiring people. We should really blame the system wonks and catass munchkin powergamers, who refused to play anything different from the D&D style games.

I was going to start name dropping the old pre-D&D stuff, but my memory was shaky, I couldn't remember what I had in addition to Chainmail, there was Swords & Something...so I did a GIS and mmm...I love memory lane.

Chainmail (http://www.acaeum.com/DDIndexes/SetPages/Chainmail.html)
Supplements (http://www.acaeum.com/DDIndexes/SetPages/Supplements.html)

Used to have all of those, albeit later prints (late 70s). I got into AD&D via miniatures->Chainmail->D&D Basic Set (which I hated and really didn't play, I instantly bought...)->AD&D 1st Ed. Still remember walking into the hobby shop in 1976 or 77 and seeing some Ral Partha minis, I was hooked instantly. Reading the original print Dungeon Masters Guide in 6th grade: priceless. Still have it, though it's pretty marked up now.

Haemmy: yes.

No, Tolkien doesn't speak of hitpoints. I'm just talking about the kind of thinking he's instilled in the fantasy genre as a whole (and some science fiction to an extent). It's a genre and writing style more defined by it's focus on setting, with plot and character depth taking a backseat (more or less). A genre that devotes entire chapters to geography, weaponry, races, history, languages, and the like, but very rarely gets inside characters' heads or tries to flesh them out beyond their roles and relationships to the rest of the "party of adventurers".   

It all begins with LotR. None of these characters depart from the same archetypal role you see them represent the moment you meet them. The Frodo on page 1 is the same as the Frodo on page 1000.....Just a little more homesick perhaps. The plot/story in the end is the same one that you were told on page 1 as well (i.e. Sauron's ring must be destroyed). Everything in between is just sightseeing in Tolkien's world.

Tolkien may not have created hitpoints, but he did set a blueprint for group/archetypal dynamics, and how the world the characters move in is given more focus than the characters themselves. And with each successive Tolkien wannabe over the decades, it just gets worse.

I think any game designers who are already immersed in this category of literature are going to take that with them into how they design and implement games. Whether that be consciously or subconsciously.

That isn't to say that it's impossible to crawl out of these limitations though. That isn't saying that Tolkien is directly responsible either. I just think certain ways of doing things have loomed over the genre for years, and that it takes a truly well rounded person to step out of the mold.

See, that's why you SHOULDN'T blame Tolkein. He wasn't writing a fantasy novel, he was writing an imaginary history. He was writing mythology. As such, the way he wrote was suited to the style. The way you suggest would not only not have been suited to the style, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. It wouldn't have made sense.

Blame the talentless Tolkein sycophants who can't break out of that mold, just like you should blame the munchkins. Because their dollars are really the ones to blame.

Tolkien said once that he wrote the Middle Earth stories because he wanted to create a world where a standard greeting would be elen sila lumen omentielvo (a star shines upon this, the hour of our meeting).

It's interesting to read the books with that in mind.

If Saruman and his henchmen had rolled into the Shire on page 1, Frodo, Sam, Pip, and Merry would have been falling over themselves to lick his boots clean when they weren't sniveling in the corner like little bitches.  In the last chapter, they straight up kick their asses.

This is a little nitpicky, because I think it is generally true that Tolkien was more interested in creating a mythology (iirc, his main goal was to write a Catholicized replacement for the Anglo mythology wiped out by the Normans, with sturdy little british yeomen saving the universe and all that) than a character-driven story.  We don't really get inside the mind of Beowulf, either.

Good point.  Lots of people disliked the "scouring of the Shire" chapter, but I thought it was a good ending, bringing everything full circle while at the same time demonstrating how the characters had grown (literally in some cases).

Another example of character growth (maybe the only one that they didn't cut from the movies) is the relationship between Legolas and Gimli, which goes from distrust to good-natured rivalry to friendship as each gradually put aside his centuries-old prejudices against the other's race.

I'm eagerly awaiting something from Stray about Tolkien that I can actually agree on.  You know, something that isn't total bollocks.

Oh, and Lt Dan won this thread ages ago.  The trouble, I think, is the age old one that when developers try new things they usually royally fuck it up.  Like HAM in SWG - which sucks the marrow of the earth - and various other departures over the years.  What I'd like to see is a lot more realism in these games, which the original D&D had in abundance, despite the 'game mechanics'.  You try taking 10,000 worth of gold out of the dungeon without a pony and sack, bitchcakes.  Hitpoints were just a translation of all the things that were HARD to translate in the game.  Positioning, endurance, luck, etc.  Hell, the whole AC and HP system was just taking complicated mechanics and making it easy.

The problem, years and years later, is that now we can make complicated systems we don't.

Lazy fuckers.

Don't get me started on AI programming.

Indeed, and look at how many other areas SWG dared to be different in

and look where it got them.....

Adding a second set of hitpoints is hardly replacing them.

Really? I thought only one family/tribe joined with Sauman and his (outsider) hirelings - the same family that the "snitch" early in Fellowship was from and that noone trusted.

It's been a while though.

But at least Tolkien doesn't have priests going around healing people. And magicans are VERY rare. Not at all like in fantasy RPGs really.

You've obviously never tried DMing a large party fighting multiple opponents in 3.5 rules.

Only one family actually "joined" with him - the rest just bent over and accepted his rule.  A few of them make token attempts at resistance and got locked up for it, after which the rest of the population was completely cowed.  Hence the hirelings' complete and utter shock when the Fellowship members didn't seem scared of them in the slightest.


Wizards in Tolkien are absolutely nothing like wizards in fantasy RPGs.  Mainly because Tolkien's wizards are closer to angels than mortals.

Tolkien's interest was entirely in language.  He worked on his elvish language the way a shade tree mechanic works on the same car for 20 years.  The main purpose of LotR was to frame his pet language in a setting, and to in a way bring it to life, not to do a character study.  He didn't even want to write the thing initially, except for being pestered by his friends.

Creating a Middle Earth with that much detail and history is cool in it's own right.

He wrote good poetry.

Either of those good enough for you?

You know how the LotR board game creates alternate history of the Fellowship's journey?
Fatty the Hobbit, anyone?
I'd like an MMOG that plays out a variety of alternate histories depending player choices simular to how WWWIIOnline plays out different histories of WWII.  Not Like SWG, where players are stuck in a meanless time slice of the Star Wars Saga.

The problem with most solutions in MMORPGs is they don't recognize the correct problem. As I pointed out, H/N/T is actually two very distinct problems.

#1: There are only three main specializations

#2: Most games encourage extreme specialization

When people talk about the glory days of AC, they are mostly addressing #2. When people talk about EQ having more than 3 main classes, that is addressing #1.

To get rid of healer/nuker/tank you can change the dynamics to make other specializations important, or you can discourage specialization.

I do not but the notion that as long as the game revolves around HP there will always be healer, nuker, tank. There are obvious counter-examples. Until some changes were made in FFXI Thief was just as important as nuker to most high level groups, just because of some specific game rules. (Hate management) From what I understand in EQ crowd control was very important. In a game where positioning matters big fat guys that can stand in the way of other guys might be important. They wouldn't draw aggro or get hit, just be annoying. Like in AC2 where they had those dudes that could put up walls.

I agree.  If every class is a hybrid, and no class is a specialist, there is no trinity.  The concern would be how to balance the tank mage.  The benefit might be more fluid gameplay - the 'tank' is the person who currently has the most hitpoints, the 'healer' is the person who is not in position to attack or who's attack is recharging.  Course, this requires players who have some capacity to think on their feet.  It would widen the gap between good players and not so good.

AC1 had a couple of the spec's going for it too.  If you hit a critter in the back it would do more damage than hitting it in the front (especially if it had a shield), so fighting against a wall or each others back was pretty common.  Buff management was essential, in that you would rock out and wipe the floor clean while buffed, but if your buff went down you were dead meat.  But it was more fluid in that every encounter didn't need the holy trinity...and then it might be something weird like someone with a butt load of jump or a buttload of lockpicking that was needed on a certain quest or dungeon.  Of course my time with AC1 was when it was with the new pk light (pink people) and the new tradeskills.  It sure wasn't like that the first year of AC.

Of course at one time AC and UO seemed the more casual friendly, the one where you could log on, get something done in 30 mins and actually advance and log out.  Not sure if it is that way still.

Just thinking out loud, but AC1, UO, Planetside, WWIIOnline, Toontown all don't have the unholy trinity in it as far as I can remember.

The Tank, Healer and Nuker debate needs to be put on the back burner for awhile and attention payed to the rest of the "world".  It has been allowed to dominate and steer MMOGs for too long at the expense of the rest of the game.

At the very least we should have a decent mounted and sea-going combat.  Overall mounts, ships and aerial vehicles need do more than take you from zone to zone. 

I like the cut of your jib, sailor. This post should be bronzed and put in the lobby of every mmo dev.

And everyone should be playing Planetside to see how mmo pvp should work. Because a lot of that line of thought went into PS.

Planetside screwed the pooch with their bullshit CaveWar expansion. It should have been PlanetSide: Waterworld with resources. A jetski with missles isn't a tank, a healer, OR a nuker.

Agreed. The cave expansion actually led me to quit. We didn't more places to fight. We needed more cool shit to fight with.

I completely agree on the boneheadedness of the cave expansion.

Mind if I add BFR's to the list?

I thought those were a decent addition. But don't you need x amount of Cave kills to get one? Blah.

As I understand it, there's a pipe under the Pacific that goes from Sydney to (I think) L.A., if that's what you're talking about.. if not, I don't have a clue what you're on about..

Planetside was nigh unplayable from here though. It would have been okay for free, but not for monthly money.

Which is too slow. More details in this rather good explanation:

http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html

My friend plays BF1942 at about 200ms delay on his crappy copper. He's actually great at the game because he has learned to compensate for the lag somehow. When I was on dialup, I found anything over 150ms to be getting a bit too slow. In PS, you could probably play a support role, though.

Yep, something like 100 'unique' kills and 5 captures

Heres the kicker though, 'unique' kills were, on release I think, 100 completely different people. Since this was a wee bit on the hard side it got changed down to 'not the same guy within 20 mins of killing him the last time' or something similar.

The 5 captures had to be 'significantly contested' I dont know the specifics, but the upshot is that you had to have quite a little skirmish down there for a capture to qualify

The kills were therefore the easy bit

Don't get me wrong, I got my biffer (BFR) imprint (because it was something to do) but I've never certed it (and I doubt I ever will because I like my other certs too much). I like the concept but unfortunately (at least if you play TR with our obsession with footzerging) they tend to kill off a decent fight because of how much damage they do (and how easy it is to pull one compared to the main battle tanks).

Granted it can be easy to kill one but the situation has to be just right unless you specifically cert for biffer jihad (generally the easy ones to kill are n00b pilots who havent worked out that they need ground support to keep the grunts out from under/behind them - I actually have more luck/fun killing a bailing gunner then killing the biffer.

The flight varients are just stupid though, they are basically just jack-in-the-box tanks (jump up and attack, land and regen, rinse, repeat). Also difficult to kill them because they get usually jump away really easily.

As an aside I used to play Quake/Teamfortress on any server with a 400 ping or less back in my dialup days (and they were never typicallyy less than 200). Front line grunt in PS is probably unrealistic on a 200 ping but you could probably stealth/eng, stealth/med, eng or med with a 200 ping ok - not the most exciting gameplay I grant you.....

Actually, I found the opposite to be true most of the time. After BFRs were added it seemed like there were actual battle lines that formed. With BFRs on both sides, the battle lines shift back and forth between bases trading fire. I can see where they do kill some fighting inside base walls but that was about it.

PlanetSide uses client side hit detection so your ping doesn't matter a whole lot as long as it's within a reasonable range.

Only if both sides had an [almost] equal number of biffers then maybe


Unfortunately the client tends to get it wrong (certainly as far as getting run over by vehicles is concerned)